With the increasing popularity of mobile devices (e.g., smart telephones and other such wireless devices), such target devices become vulnerable to virus attacks. For example, mobile phones are increasingly being provided with features such as ability to access electronic mail and world-wide web, multi-media messaging services (MMS), games, short message services (SMS), desktop applications, etc. Due to such connectivity applications, mobile phones (or mobile devices, in general) are increasingly more vulnerable to virus attacks. Furthermore the virus can spread from one mobile phone to another, thereby infecting additional mobile phones.
Existing virus scanning process includes scanning mobile devices through a connection with a PC, scanning through a local anti-virus software installed on a smart phone or a scanning engine installed on a server end communicating with a smart phone through network connection. The virus scanning results normally include file names or program identifications of virus.
Users of the existing anti-virus software may only see the results of virus scanning, instantaneously detected security threat on his/hers mobile phone, and the search results cannot tell a user how badly a detected virus have effected his/her mobile phone and personal information. A mobile virus may infect thousands of mobile phones, but an individual victim may only know his/her situation through searching the web or a broadcast from an anti-virus software producer.
With the development of social networks and micro blogging service, the way of communication has been greatly changed. Individuals are now capable of sharing what they observe in their surroundings, information about events, and what their opinions are about certain topics, for example government policies in healthcare. Moreover, these services store various metadata from these posts, such as the location and time of these shared posts. However, information concerning other mobile applications, such as, virus scanning results, must be input manually by the user of social networks or micro blogging service. Due to the limit of mobile device-human interface, input operation on mobile device is not as easy as PC keyboard and mouse, and transferring information between applications on mobile platform could be a time-consuming task.
One of the advantages of social networks and micro blogging service is their nature of being open. A user can share information to his/her surroundings with the people who have never been known to the user. However, such sharing may not broadcast the information to certain unknown users who have definite interest to the content of the information, unless the unknown users become the follower/surroundings of the sharing user. For example, a user may share his/her virus scanning results with his/her followers/surroundings, but the user may not post/send the scanning results to other virus victims if the victim is not on the follower list of the sharing user.